2. Sebastian

Chapter 2

Sebastian

W ell, I couldn’t take that back now.

I wasn’t sure what it was about the woman who was on her knees before me on the sticky wooden floor of Smokey’s Bar on a Tuesday night. I was four beers deep, sure, but it wasn’t like I couldn’t handle my alcohol and needed to call it. I was barely on the border of tipsy.

Maybe it was the way she’d clearly been rattled when her eyes hit me — I hadn’t quite clocked if that was just from my physique or if she recognized me. Maybe it was the clear panic and the way her cheeks darkened against her tanned skin, hiding the smattering of freckles across her nose. Maybe it was the fact that she fit my type to a T, with rich brown hair and streaks of blonde running through it, with her not-quite-green and not-quite-brown eyes that seemed to soak up the light and reflect it back at me.

Or maybe I was just exceptionally needy tonight because none of my teammates had wanted to join me for a drink and I wanted to make the most of my free night off while my son, Matty, was being taken care of by my sister .

“You…you can’t be serious,” she said, nervous laughter making the words bounce as they fell from her lips. Slowly, she lifted herself from the floor, her loose-fitting jeans and black tee slipping across her body and back into place, and for just a second, I wanted to put my hand on her shoulder and push her back down.

Somehow, I resisted my base instincts.

“That’s, uh, certainly the most forward offer I’ve ever received,” she chuckled, her lower lip slipping between her teeth as I rose to my full height beside her. She barely reached my shoulders. “But my Uber will be here any second.”

“Stay,” I insisted. I leaned back on the bartop, patting the stool I’d been sitting on with my palm. “At least let me buy you a drink since you bought so many for your friend.”

Her lips parted on a hitched breath as she looked between my hand and the door, her phone clutched between her fingers. “I’ll have to pay a fee if I cancel my Uber…”

“I’ll pay it.” Am I really stooping that low for some company? “And I’ll pay for the replacement one later.”

Her plump, rosy lips rolled between her teeth as she tried to stifle a laugh. “Okay, now you really can’t be serious.”

I held her gaze as she flicked her eyes to mine. Hazel. That’s what that color’s called. “I’ll send it on PayPigeon right now.”

The first knuckle of her forefinger rubbed against the tip of her nose, making it bounce back and forth as she eyed me warily. “You’d need my number for that.”

I fought the muscles in my face, trying to keep my lips from turning up. “Did you think I wouldn’t ask you for it regardless? ”

The shade of her cheeks only deepened.

She hesitated for a moment, mulling the options over in statuesque silence amongst the dull sounds of the bar, but then her thumb was moving, hitting the Cancel Ride button on her screen. A second later, she hoisted herself up onto the barstool beside where I stood.

Her initial reluctance told me everything I needed to know: she didn’t know who I was, and she wasn’t throwing herself at me like the puck bunnies, or flames , as we liked to call them. And God, that made her so much more likable.

“What do you like?”

Her lips popped open again, her eyes going wide. “Uh… I mean, that’s, wow , right to the point.”

“Right to the point?” I asked, taking a sip from my glass and raising a brow.

She tucked her hair behind her ears and avoided my gaze, those freckles becoming harder and harder to see as her face heated further. “Confidence, I guess, and external stimulation…”

I snorted hard enough that I could feel the burn of my whiskey in the back of my nose. “I was asking about drinks . So that I can order you one.”

“Oh my God.” Her elbows came down on the bar, her face slumping into her waiting hands.

I tried to bite back the rising laughter in my throat, but I succumbed, something between a chuckle and a cackle escaping as I pushed my glass on the bartop toward her elbow. “It’s fine. It was cute.”

She shook her head, her forearms moving side to side, and when she finally lifted her face just an inch from her hands and peeked at me through her lashes, her lipstick had smudged across her cheek from her palms. “No, it’s insane.”

“It really isn’t,” I laughed. With the buzz of alcohol lowering my inhibitions, I slipped my hand between hers and her face, cupping the soft line of her chin with my thumb and fingers. Her breath hitched when I turned her head to look up at me. “You’ve got lipstick on your face.”

“Like lipstick in a place that it’s not meant to be? Or are you just being observant?”

“A bit of both.” Pushing her hands out of the way, I used my thumb to swipe at the smear while keeping her locked in place. Shit, I made it worse.

She eyed me warily, her brows narrowing as her gaze flicked between my arm and my face. Her pulse thrummed beneath my fingertips, heavy and fast and unsettling, and the way her lips parted just enough to see a hint of her teeth had me imagining all the filthy things I wanted to use her mouth for.

I didn’t even know her name .

“Hold still,” I instructed. Bringing my free hand to my lips, I dropped my tongue, dragging my thumb across it on instinct like I did for Matty when he got food all over his face.

She leaned back, breaking my grasp, and I stilled. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she laughed, but her gaze dropped to my lips, hovering. “Do not put your saliva on my face. Who knows what kind of diseases you’re carrying?”

“Don’t act like you weren’t considering options that would involve my saliva in far more nefarious places,” I deadpanned.

She swallowed.

A little mirror appeared almost out of thin air, and after she’d wiped the smudged lipstick from her skin with a precision that held me captive like I was watching the greatest movie ever filmed, she dropped it back where it must have come from — her purse.

I hadn’t stopped thinking of the toy she kept in there.

“I’ve been having margaritas,” she said slowly, finally answering my question from before with the slightest hint of a quiver in her voice. “But I like whiskey, too. I’ll have one of whatever you had.”

————

It took an hour for me to convince her to tell me her name. I’d called her everything in my arsenal until that point — sweetie, darling, cutie, princess, kitten. Hell, I’d even thrown in baby, which wasn’t something I let slip from my tongue easily.

But none of them felt as right between my teeth as Penelope. Or, rather, Nelly for short.

“Come on,” Nelly grinned, pushing back on the bar and making her stool lean back on two legs. “I told you mine. It’s only fair that you tell me yours.”

She’d sipped at two doubles of whiskey, neat, like a fucking champ, over the time we’d been chatting. Somehow, in that time, we’d learned almost nothing useful about each other.

She’d told me her favorite board games as a child and that her parents lived on opposite sides of the country. She told me that she played soccer in high school and talked endlessly for about twenty minutes straight about some of the wildest college drama I’d ever heard from her time at UCF.

I’d told her about the time I broke my shoulder falling off the monkey bars as a child and I told her about the time we’d buried someone else’s cat in our backyard by mistake when I was ten and how we only realized when Otto came walking in two weeks later. I also told her about the teacher I’d had in seventh grade, whose last name was Miss and how confusing it had been for everyone trying to call her Ms. Miss.

And I didn’t talk about hockey once.

“Have you earned it?” I teased, downing the last of my glass and swallowing past the burn.

Her lower lip jutted out in a pout, and God , she was so fucking cute. The two legs of the stool that hovered slammed back into the wooden floor. “How have I not?”

She didn’t flinch when my finger hooked under her chin, and I tilted her defiant little face up to me, but that heat in her cheeks came back with a roaring vengeance when the words slipped past my lips. “You haven’t taken me home , Nelly.”